The Final Review: What’s in the Bank and What’s Still Unsaid?
With Georgina Woudstra and Allard de Jong
Episode 29 of the Teams Transformed Podcast
About Teams Transformed
Teams Transformed is the podcast for courageous coaches, curious leaders, and anyone passionate about unlocking the true power of teams. Hosted by TCS Founder and Senior Faculty Georgina Woudstra and Allard De Jong, listen to explore transformational insights on how to coach teams with presence, depth, and emergence, diving into not just the tools, but the art of team coaching itself.
About this episode
In this penultimate episode of the Team Coaching Journey: Where Teams Come Alive, Georgina Woudstra and Allard de Jong explore what happens when a team coaching engagement reaches the end of its initial cycle. Rather than treating the final review as a definitive endpoint, they reflect on how taking stock can reveal new learning, unfinished business, and opportunities for a further phase of development.
Following the story of the ACME leadership team, Georgina and Allard revisit the six-month coaching journey they have been exploring throughout the series. They reflect on what has shifted for the team, what has transferred into their everyday team meetings, and where there is still work to do.
One of the most significant changes they observe is that the team now feels much more like a team with a growing capacity to disagree productively. Humour and lightness have begun to enter the room alongside a greater willingness to challenge one another.
At the same time, the team recognises that this progress is still fragile and a hunger for a second phase of work begins to emerge. Together, Georgina and Allard explore how the team itself begins to co-design this next phase.
Georgina and Allard reflect on how their own relationship and ways of working together have evolved throughout the journey, including whether they might intentionally model more disagreement between themselves, rather than automatically supporting each other’s moves. If the team is learning to disagree more effectively, perhaps the coaches can model effective disagreement themselves.
The episode closes with an invitation for coaches to develop their own approach to team coaching.
Key Themes Explored in this episode
The End of a Cycle Is Not Necessarily the End
Georgina and Allard challenge the idea that a final review means a team has “arrived.” Instead, the end of a six-month engagement can mark the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. Development continues as teams encounter new challenges, changes, and opportunities.
Review Creates Learning
The final review provides an important opportunity to look back at the team’s original intentions, assess what has shifted, and identify what remains unfinished. Taking stock helps teams recognise progress while also making visible the next learning edge.
Teams Can Learn to Enjoy Being Together
One of the clearest shifts in the ACME leadership team is a greater sense of connection and enjoyment. What once felt like something to endure has become a space where team members increasingly identify with and value being part of the team.
Productive Disagreement Requires Courage
The team has become more comfortable disagreeing and challenging one another. At the same time, Georgina and Allard recognise that social politeness and guardedness still appear. Developing the capacity to speak openly takes time, practice, and trust.
Transfer Into the Workplace Matters
The quality of contact experienced during team coaching sessions does not automatically transfer into everyday team meetings. The ACME team has only recently begun practising what they have learned in their workplace, highlighting the importance of supporting transfer beyond the coaching container.
Teams Can Relapse
The team’s concern about relapsing illustrates how fragile new ways of working can initially be. Meaningful change requires continued practice and reinforcement if new behaviours are to become part of the team’s everyday way of relating.
The Container Must Continue to Strengthen
As team members prepare to take greater interpersonal risks, the coaches recognise the need to maintain and strengthen the container. Felt safety allows people to move into the deeper end of the work and say what has previously remained unsaid.
The Next Phase Can Be Co-Designed
Rather than the coaches arriving with a predetermined Phase Two, the team itself begins to articulate what it wants to work on next. This includes exploring individual barriers to speaking up, challenging others, and receiving feedback and support from colleagues.
The Coaches Are Part of the System
Georgina and Allard reflect on their own relationship and how their ways of working together have evolved. Their growing fluidity, complementary strengths, and willingness to examine their own interactions become part of the coaching process.
Parallel Process Creates Learning
The coaches wonder whether they should model more disagreement between themselves, recognising that how they relate may offer the team another experience of what effective disagreement can look like. The coaching relationship itself becomes part of the learning environment.
Team Coaching Is Cyclical
Looking back across the full journey, Georgina and Allard emphasise that the process is not a straight line. The end of one cycle can loop back into earlier stages as new learning needs emerge and the team enters another phase of development.
There Is No Single Team Coaching Journey
The journey shared throughout the series is illustrative rather than definitive. Different teams may require different interventions, from stakeholder interviews and observation to workshops, diagnostics, individual profiling, or larger organisational experiments.
Develop Your Own Approach
Georgina and Allard invite coaches to make the team coaching journey their own. The approach should be congruent with the coach’s philosophy of teams, learning, development, and what is needed in the world, with each element connected coherently to the others.
Key Takeaways
🌱 The end of a coaching cycle does not necessarily mean the end of development.
🔄 Team development is cyclical, with one phase often opening into another.
🤝 Teams can develop a greater sense of connection and enjoyment in being together.
💬 Productive disagreement requires practice, courage, and psychological safety.
👂 What happens inside the coaching room needs to transfer into everyday team life.
🧩 New behaviours can be fragile and require continued attention to prevent relapse.
🛡️ A strong coaching container helps teams take interpersonal risks.
🪞 Coaches should pay attention to their own relationship and the parallel process within the work.
🎭 Humour, playfulness, and creativity can help teams experiment with new ways of relating.
🌍 Team coaching must respond to the wider organisational system and its stakeholders.
🛤️ There is no single definitive team coaching journey; coaches should develop an approach that is congruent with their own philosophy.
✨ The art of team coaching grows through practice, reflection, experimentation, and learning.
Why listen?
This final episode of Where Teams Come Alive offers an honest reflection on what happens when a team coaching engagement reaches the end of its initial cycle. Rather than presenting transformation as a finished achievement, Georgina Woudstra and Allard de Jong explore the complexity of reviewing progress, recognising unfinished work, and deciding what needs to happen next.
The conversation also offers a valuable behind-the-scenes look at the coaches themselves. Georgina and Allard reflect on how their partnership has evolved, how their own relationship can become part of the learning system, and how they might intentionally stretch their ways of working together in a second phase.
For team coaches, leaders, facilitators, and anyone interested in team transformation, this episode provides a grounded reminder that there is rarely a neat moment when a team can declare itself “done.” Development continues. New learning edges emerge. The work changes shape.
Ultimately, as a coach, the journey is yours to make your own. Put your approach into practice, reflect on what works, notice your own learning edges, and gradually grow into the art of team coaching.
About your hosts
Georgina Woudstra is the Founder and Senior Faculty of Team Coaching Studio, an ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC) with over 20 years of experience. Georgina is recognised globally as one of the leading lights in team coaching and was among the first coaches to receive ICF's Advanced Certificate in Team Coaching.
Allard De Jong is a seasoned leadership development expert with two decades of experience solving organisational 'people problems' and accelerating leadership development. He brings a unique perspective on transformative inquiry and divergent thinking to team coaching practice.
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